


Companions

by Ann7121



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 13:02:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17284559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ann7121/pseuds/Ann7121
Summary: A conversation. Sometime during Season 2.





	Companions

“I lied to Blake you know.”

"Everyone lies to Blake if they have any sense. It's the only way to stop his mind games. The man is a master manipulator." 

“Don't you want to know when?”

"Not particularly,” he thinks but doesn't voice. He feels some obligation. He has never been comfortable with intimate revelations, even with Anna but the intensity of their union has lingered, opening his mind to her needs and he finds he cannot just shove it all back in and close the drawer as he had planned. Everything, he reflects sourly, has its price and this is the price she demands for their moment of pleasure- that he listens. It's why he usually prefers to buy his sexual experiences. But he likes Cally. Her 'otherness' intrigues him and she looks so appealing, sitting up in the bed, knees drawn to her chin, elfin face peeping up at him, that he finds his reluctance displaced by a humorous sort of tenderness, though whether this is her feeling for him or his for her, he is still too entangled in her mind to tell.

"Go on then. Why did you lie?" 

Thankfully she's not the sort of girl to play coy games: You don't really want to know...Oh but I do... Are you sure? Instead she stares into the middle distance, eyes impossibly large.

“I lied about being sent to Sauron Major. I wasn't sent there. I went there when the Council banished me from Auron.”

"Banished you? What did you do to deserve that?"

She had been so young when she left, she tells him. He realises she means in experience not years. “Just the three of us, me, my twin Nessa and Yoram, beautiful Yoram. “

Despite himself, he finds he is intrigued to be learning about her history. Had she loved this beautiful young man? Is heartbreak what connects them? 

“Yoram's father arranged our transport to Sauran Major.”

"So what did you do Cally, to get yourself banished, " he asks again with an edge of derision, "you, Nessa and the beautiful young man? Threaten the Controller? Blow up a replica plant? "

Endearingly she is serious, even sad as she replies. “We weren't violent. Never violent. Yoram organised a couple of protest meetings. I delivered pamphlets. Nessa gave speeches.”

"That's it?" He is incredulous, even, he realises, slightly indignant on her behalf. " They banished you for a few meetings? I thought Auron was supposed to be an enlightened society. They're little better than the Federation."

“They'd just decided on the neutrality policy you see. Not everyone was in agreement. They were worried that our telepathy would stir up an open rebellion. Our Elders were not telepathic, and telepathy frightened them. But they needed have worried,” she continues bitterly, “our siblings didn't want to know. They begged us to give up protesting and when we wouldn't they cut themselves off from us.”

" Gutless." He is scathing. "I've always suspected that the Auronar believed themselves too good for the rest of humanity" . 

“I believed the Elders had chosen shamefully. And how long would such an aggressive Empire respect our neutrality any way? Three months later,” she continues, “we were hiding out on the farm of one of Sauron's major cultivators of plant steroids. He was a rebel sympathiser and we made contact through him with a group of Freedom Fighters. But then we disagreed about whether we should join them. They seemed to use such violent methods you see..."

"And that upset your delicate Auron sensibilities?" His derision is more open this time. He believes in decision, not endless moral debate. Do what you have to to survive or surrender and die, that's the choice,

“Yes,” she smiles at him ruefully. “ Gutless wasn’t I? In the end, the choice was taken from us. The Federation invaded the planet and we had to flee to the hills. We watched from our hiding place as our host was driven into the Saura fields to die.”

"Saura?" he interrupts " those fleshy red plants? Blake claimed they were sentient."

“They seemed to have a primitive kind of awareness.” She shivers now. “They have poisoned barbs on their leaves and they are carnivorous. Our host died slowly.” Dreamily she continues. “I knew we had no choice then. We had to learn to fight.”

"And to kill?" He is unrelenting, wishing to cut through the feyness she exudes, the very quality, ironically, that so attracts him.

“Oh yes. To kill.” She remembers the feel of the first gun she ever held; such a flimsy weapon yet the destruction it caused so horrifying. She had trained herself to use it, first on tin cans, and then on furless saurats, wincing as their bodies jerked, squealed and rolled limply, closing her eyes to the mess of mangled flesh and blood where her bullet had torn through the shiny pink skin. She had initially been overwhelmed by the feeling of power it gave her, the power to choose which life would end at her hands. Later when she killed her first man, she had had to steel herself against the uprush of his terror invading her mind, before abruptly, it stopped as he choked and died. “I became rather good at killing.”

On Auron her rebellion had been civilised and intellectual, but gradually on Sauron it had coarsened to a ruthless determination to destroy regardless of the human cost. Nessa had striven for a while to temper her fanaticism, sending streams of compassion for those they had killed to cool the heat in her brain. But then Yoram had fallen in a skirmish. 

"You loved him". It's a statement not a question. He can sense it, recognise it as the feeling he had for Anna.

“Did I?” She is surprised by his certainty. “Was that love? Maybe it was. I was very young. I think Nessa cared more for him than I did but I did care and...”

"And he was very beautiful," he finishes for her, amused at how naive she still seems.

Cally doesn't acknowledge his interjection. She is caught in the memory of the slow, endless fall, of Yoram's body cartwheeling under the impact of the grenade and tumbling headlong from the cliff. She had felt his death as her own, they both had, and later they had crept down and searched the scrubby wasteland at the foot of the cliff for a sign of movement. Hopeless, they knew but they had had to try. There was nothing to see except a few fleshy Saura, clustered together twitching and swaying although there was no wind, and nothing to hear except a faint sucking. Beautiful Yoram had gone and Nessa had stopped sending her compassion. 

"And when did Nessa die?" Her distress is leaking from her, radiating uncomfortably through his body, reminding him of his own losses and he wants this finished now. He wants the nag of her pain over.

“Oh we were surprised by a group of soldiers, a night patrol who stumbled across our camp. She saw them first and alerted me. It wasn't until I reached safety that I realised she wasn't with us.”

Faintly, like an echo of a distance scream, he shares her terror and regret as her Nessa’s life dwindles, her anguish as the barbs bite the still-living flesh, setting nerves on fire, the cruel laughter of the Federation thugs as they watched her die.

Reluctantly, he is pulled along now, as she and her surviving companions join a well-armed, organised group of resisters and begin to inflict real damage, targeting transport and communication links, successfully disrupting Federation operations. Fascinated despite his unease, he tastes her growing satisfaction as she kills again and again, her exultation fed as fires are set in the Saura fields and their discordant, atonal whines of pain course through her/his, senses. Too late, he tries to withdraw but he is stuck fast in the webs of her memory, dragged with her over the rough ground towards the Communication Control Centre, welcoming the black cloud that hovers over the hills promising rain. As one, they watch their companions raise their faces to the cloud that lets fall the relief of its gentle waters on skin blistered by sunlight. Watch helpless while they scream, writhe and eventually fallen silent, the poison it has unleashed sending their metabolism into hyper drive, boiling their blood.

It is a dreadful consummation, as intimate as their sex, uniting them with its horror.

Alone now, silence, welcome to him but to her deadly, envelops them. 

“I had nothing left you see,” she tells him simply, “nothing but the will to find others to accompany me in the death I would choose for them.”

"And that's," the realisation sweeps through him like nausea, " that's why you follow Blake, to share his crusade to seek.." 

“Companions for our death? Yes. Then, matter-of-factly, As you do Avon.”

"No." He rejects it instantly. He is not like her. Not like Blake. Will not be like them. He wants only a safe harbour, wealth, comfort. A bolt hole. He swallows the sickness of the idea, exerts his iron control, calls up every reserve of detachment to deny what he suspects might be true. What might explain why he hasn't, despite his frequently voiced wish to be free, actually left the Liberator. 

"No wonder," he forces a smoothly mocking tone into his voice, "no wonder you lied to Blake. He would be thrilled to realise that your sole aim in following him is not ideological but suicidal. You do realise Cally, that among humans, dragging your friends with you as you seek a way to die is considered to be impolite? "

“Oh yes, Avon. You've made that very clear!” Impishly she grins at him, undeceived but willing to leave his defences intact. Then, a clear sending, private, “Blake isn't ready to admit it either.”

His heart swoops as he accepts that this is yet another with whom he fears, knows, his own death will be connected.

XXX

Later, alone beyond even his most fervent wish, her cry of Blake fading in his mind, he recognises it as her last injunction to him. The three of them, tied inextricably in the death dance, and he unable to follow her down the long path to the oblivion he resists yet craves until he is sure Blake too is dead. Wearily, unwillingly he accepts the necessity of a second journey, a twin to that that drew him to Terminal in the first place. Find Blake and die with him. Or die silent and alone. It's all that's left. 

"First light" he tells them all, "we'll make for the high ground to the South".


End file.
